1. Unless you mean something different than what I think you mean, putting cumin in hummus is as much "an Ikermawi special ingredient" as putting cheese on pizza is a Pizza Hut special ingredient.

2. Unless the Israelis have done something very funny to foul, it is distinctly not a "fava-bean paste". There's a small picture of what foul actually looks like here, but the point is that it's a fava bean stew usually eaten for breakfast with tomato and onion. You might have been confused because proper foul is lightly mashed before its olive oil bath (Arabs eat their foul with maybe four tablespoons of oil dribbled on top, after it gets into the individual serving bowl), but it is no paste, I promise you that.

EDIT: like so much journalistic writing about things you have knowledge on, this article makes me wonder what, if anything, is accurate about discussions of ethnic (defined as non-European) food in major newspapers. Speaking for myself, I think I can opine authoritatively on British, French, and middle eastern food, the last broadly defined. All I can offer about everything else is whether I liked it or not, and, to the extent it uses techniques based in some type of cookery I do know about, whether that part has been properly carried off. This latter kind of critique is nothing more than a gut reaction, borne of having poured a lot of food down my throat. It's the equivalent of a very experienced lawyer saying, in connection to something she's not an expert in, that feels wrong. I wonder what the balance of most professional food critics is between those two types of analysis.